Jon Dowland wrote: > I think quite a lot of people are very happy to use stable on desktop > systems. Most people who aren't are not typical desktop users > themselves, but geeks or enthusiasts who want new-fangled stuff. For > day-to-day office tasks and the like, a rock-solid base, where the > layout of buttons etc. doesn't change every other week, is infinitely > more desirable.
Anecdotal evidence to suppoort that; my dad. In the past several years
I've bounced around email clients. Name it and chances are I've run it.
TBird, sylpheed-claws, KMail, mutt, Evolution, Squirrelmail, elmo, pine,
Pegasus, Lookout! and a slew of others I've forgotten. Every few months I
poke and different email clients hoping to find something closer to my ideal.
I'm always looking for better.
My dad, in that same time, has used one client. PMMail. He started on
PMMail/2 back when I was big into OS/2 and PMMail/2. When OS/2, for all
intents and purposes died, he moved to PMMail98 on Windows 98. He's since
upgraded to PMMail2000 which is just a minor bugfix and rebranding to a
company that bought it and promptly never supported it. He's using an email
client who's core was written over a decade ago and is happy with it. So much
so that as much as I try to get him to move over to TBird, the closest to
PMMail in functionality and interface, he won't budge. Not even the promise
of built-in Bayesian spam protection can sway him.
In the end Stable should remain precisely because noone else is doing it
the Debian way. To say it is a failure and insist it should do things
differently is to ignore that for certain people it is a success and it does
have benefits.
--
Steve C. Lamb | I'm your priest, I'm your shrink, I'm your
PGP Key: 8B6E99C5 | main connection to the switchboard of souls.
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